Four Strategies to Cultivate Employee Loyalty

Employee loyalty is essential for any business that wants to succeed. People are at the core of every strategy and outcome.  Let’s dive right into 4 strategies that will help employers cultivate employee loyalty.

1. Build an empowering work environment

Employees are more likely to be loyal to a company where they feel valued and respected. Create a work environment where employees feel safe to share ideas and try new things. Organizations must also understand and support employees’ personal needs.

Be transparent and honest. Employees want to know what is going on. They appreciate transparency on company goals, challenges, and changes.

Give employees a voice. Create opportunities for employees to share their feedback and ideas. This could be through regular one-on-one meetings, team meetings or employee surveys.

Recognize and appreciate employees. Make sure to recognize and reward employees for their hard work and accomplishments. This could be through verbal praise, written recognition or financial rewards.

Offer flexible work arrangements. In the post-pandemic world, flexible work arrangements are here to stay. Analyze what you can do to meet your people where they are at. You could offer remote work options, flexible work hours or creative forms of paid time off.

2. Invest in employee development.

Employees are seeking opportunities to continue to grow and develop their careers.  Employers can fill that gap and cultivate employee loyalty by investing in employee development:

Offer training and development opportunities. Provide employees with opportunities to learn new skills and knowledge. This could take the form of in-house training, online courses or tuition reimbursement.

Encourage employees to pursue career advancement. Create a culture where employees feel comfortable pursuing career advancement opportunities. This could involve offering mentorship programs and leadership development programs.

Provide employees with feedback and coaching. Help employees identify their strengths and weaknesses. Provide them with feedback and coaching to help them take their next career step.

3. Offer competitive employee benefits.

Employee benefits play a major role in attracting and retaining top talent. In today’s job market, it is important to offer a competitive benefits package. Here are some fundamentals employees are looking for:

Benchmark your benefits package against other companies in your industry. This will help you to ensure that your benefits package is competitive.

Offer a variety of benefits options. Employees have unique needs and priorities. Consider a variety of benefits to meet the needs of the different generations in your workforce.

Review your benefits package. Make sure to review your benefits package on a regular basis. Your workforce, and the benefits landscape change every year. Work with your broker to ensure that it is still meeting the needs of your employees.

4. Conduct employee benefits benchmarking

Employee benefits benchmarking is vital to ensure your benefits stack up to the competition. It helps identify where your benefits package is strong and areas for improvement.

Being knowledgeable of what your peers pay for benefits by utilizing benchmarking data is crucial. It helps ensure that your benefits plan aligns with your organization’s goals and budget — and as competitive as possible.

As your plan members use their benefits, they incur claims. But how you manage those claims is within your control.

Benchmarking allows you to build a benefits package tailored to your people and have the greatest impact on retention and attraction.

Here are the core steps of a benchmarking-driven strategy to cultivate employee loyalty:

• Identify areas of strength and weakness compared to your competitors.
• Work with your benefits advisor to identify high-impact enhancements.
• Make changes and refine for long-term improvement

Employee loyalty is essential for any business that wants to succeed. Hiring and training new talent is much more expensive than keeping your best people. The four strategies above are the foundation of building a workplace that supports your retention goals, supports your people and cultivates employee loyalty.